Deutsche Telekom has signed a cloud partnership with Avaya to develop the first cloud-based call centre solution in Europe.
The solution will use Avaya’s fully virtualised Aura software, while T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom’s ICT division, will provide the cloud infastructure, application and service management, as well as data protection and security.
The service will be available to companies across Europe and will be operated out of Germany. Both companies said the solution will be able to be scaled according to seasonal demands or business decisions such as mergers, outsourcing or insourcing. The service’s customers will only pay for what they use.
Deutsche Telekom has been using Avaya’s call centre software for around a decade, with 30,00 agents handling 70 million calls per year. Avaya and T-Systems also work together on advising and building call centre infrastructures for companies such as the mail order retailer Otto.
The partnership is part of T-Systems’ wider strategy of expanding its range of standardised IT products. The Deutsche Telekom division has previously said it wants standardised IT products to make half of its revenue by 2017.
T-Systems will be keen to earn revenue from cloud products after its sales fell eight percent in its most recent trading quarter. The division said it was moving out of “less profitable activities”.
Speaking to Mobile Europe’s sister magazine European Communications, T-Systems UK CEO Casper Malig said in January that cloud products were increasingly central to the business.
He said: “Medium to large size companies (revenues of £1-10 billion) are now looking to deploy enterprise cloud services that will allow them to pursue their growth ambitions while leapfrogging a stage in development that would previously have required them to commit huge capital investments in IT infrastructure. There is a real explosion of opportunity in the marketplace within this category given the possibilities that cloud computing offers them.”